In this blog, I am not the tourist but the tour guide and ethnographer. I was on my way back from ten days of doing Vipassana mediation in Jesup, GA with a fellow meditator from Canada. He needed a ride to the Jacksonville airport and since I was going that way, I gave him a…

My trip to Iran in November 1977 is what got me hooked on foreign travel. The friendly people, their intensely interesting culture, customs and country instilled in me the desire to visit more places outside the USA. How I got to Iran was by sitting sideways in a USAF C-141 cargo plane for hours and hours with a couple dozen other American GIs…

Exhilaration and dread. Those two emotions have always been what I felt when traveling by road in Asia, but this time it was more intense. My two guides and I were blasting down a mountain road in a beat up old Toyota Land Cruiser on our way back to Ruma. The road was barely wide enough for the Cruiser and in Third World style…

After my face smacked the headrest in front of me, I sat in my bus seat and thought: “Wow. I survived.” Other than a little numbness in my upper lip, I felt fine. For several seconds all was silent in the bus. Everyone was stunned. Then came the crying, screaming and chaos. After struggling to get out, I found out…

One by one, the other tourists and I stepped off of the bus and walked the hundred or so yards to the memorial stupa at Choeung Ek. Though a modern building, its design was traditional Khmer architecture in appearance with a spire rising high above it like a lightning rod. It had twin entrance doors, two stories high and very…

I could hear my horse’s hooves below making a pleasing clip-clop-clip-clop and his neckbell staying in time with a musical ding-ding-ding-ding. The dry high altitude air of Nepal was on my face causing the scarf covering my nose and mouth to flap. The horse’s movements I felt through the saddle. With my eyes closed, these were the only sensations I…

Ngoc had a pretty good idea that this American would like what he had in mind. Standing there with the American’s cameras draped over his shoulder, he was thinking that this guy would go for something different. Ngoc had met the American only a few days ago. He had flown in from Hue’ and was on a week’s tour of…

About 40 million years ago a huge drifting island chunk of Earth’s crust humans would eventually name India came ashore on the southern part of Eurasia. The collision slowed India down by half as it continued to bulldoze its way northward. The density of rock on both sides of the two plates was similar so rather than one plate subducting…